A Vigil For Thurgood Marshall

Three days after his death, on January 27, 1993, Thurgood Marshall came to
the Supreme Court, up the marble steps, for the last time. Congress had
ordered Abraham Lincoln's catafalque brought to the Court, and on it the
casket of Thurgood Marshall lay in state. His beloved Chief, Earl Warren, had
been so honored in the Great Hall of the Court, and no one else. Congress was
right about the bier, and spoke with the voice of the people: no other
American, of any age, so deserved to lie where Lincoln slept.

To him, all day on Wednesday, the people came--a score of thousands, we
were told, in the blustery bright Washington winter. The President had said a
week before that it was spring, but he was optimistic. I stood with perhaps
two thousand of the people myself. They knew it was winter, but there was
something that they had to do. With others who had been TM's law clerks, I
kept vigil by the bier for a time. We stood by turns, in motionless respect
as the people passed. TM's son John stood there all day, hour after hour with
his trooper's straightness, full of gentle strength, his father's toughness in
his face. So by turns we stood, on hard cold marble, and the people came to
say goodbye. They too came up the steps and through the doors, above which
the Court promises the world EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW. Later the Chief Justice
said, and rightly, that no other individual had done more to make those words
reality.

But all the people made the words real on Wednesday, for they did equal
justice to his memory, one and all, the fortunate and the unfortunate
together. I stood silent waiting for them, and they were silent by and large
saying what they had come to say. Schoolchildren came, lots of them, to
promise with their teachers that the lessons he had struggled all his life to
learn would be handed down to their grandchildren, three generations
more. Others came with promises too. I remember most clearly a young man, of
seventeen or so, who came with his mother. He walked to the casket, as close
as the ropes would let him pass. He turned his palms upward, and he clenched
his fists. He put his head down on his chest; his fists were clenched so hard
I saw his arms tremble. He stood for some minutes, silent and trembling, in
the most solemn place he knew, to make the most solemn promise of his
life--whatever it was--to himself. TM would have been happy to see him there.
Such youthful moments of passionate resolve can change the world, he knew.
Thurgood Marshall had such a passionate determination, and he changed the
world.

The world was changed more than he knew, and the people came to tell him
about it. They brought him their staggering diversity, and they came before
him one last time to say: "You see... This is what equality is; this is who we
are. We are the people you strived for. We are the people you protected. We
are the People of the United States of America, and we loved you."

I stood and watched them as they came, and tried to remember each face I
saw. I tried to remember out of gratitude and love, for they knew who he was,
and came to show him who they had become because of him. I stood by his side
and realized that his long journey was over, and that there, in the Great
Hall, he was at home. Here was Odysseus returned from all his wanderings, old
and crafty, a teller of tales who had been strong enough to strike down the
wicked and unjust in his own hall.

At ten o'clock that night, the last of the people passed, and TM left the
Court forever. They lifted him from where Father Abraham had slumbered, and
bore him out from the Great Hall, down the marble steps and into history,
toward the lighted rotunda of the Capitol. Or so they told me; I wasn't
there. I could not bear to see it. I thought of him instead photographed on
those same steps--young, confident and strong, grinning with his invariable
mixture of irony and joy--celebrating with his comrades in arms the impossible
achievement of an entire nation's dream. I thought of him as he had been, and
I could not stand and watch as Odysseus sailed away once more, leaving us all
behind.